Pantheon Books | 2009 | 208 pages | List price: $24.95 | Get it for less at Amazon

A little over four years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. New Orleans and Mississippi are still recovering to this day. For those of us who witnessed the events only through news coverage, the scale of the devastation and loss can become rather impersonal. It can become a more intellectual understanding of suffering as opposed to a visceral feeling. Author Josh Neufeld on the other hand worked on the front lines as a Red Cross volunteer delivering food in Mississippi after the storm. He witnessed up close the individual stories of loss. This exposure led him to document some of these stories, and thus A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE was created.

A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE is a graphic novel that follows the stories of five groups of people as they survive Katrina. It shows them deliberating on whether to evacuate or not, how they survived the storm, and what happened to them after the devastation. The cross section of stories includes that of the Doctor who refuses to leave, and in fact hosts a hurricane party in the French Quarter, of Abbas who stays with a friend at his family owned convenience store to prevent looting, and of Leo and Michelle who leave the city with barely enough money for gas and have to leave Leo’s precious comic book collection behind. Denise, a social worker, and her family end up enduring the aftermath at the Convention Center, while Kwame and his parents and siblings flee the storm to stay at his older brother’s dorm room. Each of the stories show a different set of circumstances faced by the residents of New Orleans, and each story shows what real individuals chose to do under those circumstances.

As a cartoonist, it follows that Neufeld’s book would be presented as a graphic novel. It is the artist’s attempt to process what he has witnessed and to share that with the world. As a medium to illustrate the experience of Hurricane Katrina, the graphic novel is surprisingly successful. The beginning of the book consists of a series of panels showing the start of the storm and the ensuing flooding in New Orleans, and in this case a picture is worth a thousand words. Showing floodwaters overtaking buildings is much more effective than describing it. The graphic medium immediately brings the reader into the storm’s world. A single dark panel with large mosquitoes and one showing swimming rats gives the reader a visceral feel for what it would be like to spend the night trapped on a roof in a flooded city. The graphic novel also forces an economy of material in which the true cores of the stories are revealed. The section documenting life at the Convention Center strips down the experience to pictures of a father begging for water for his young daughter, of citizens baking in sweltering heat as Army tanks roll by and offer no assistance, of gang members keeping the peace and looting stores to provide food and water to the most needy, and of the fear of being trapped in the Convention Center to die. By hitting essential points in a graphic form, Neufeld’s book shoves the reader into the characters’ worlds and to a better understanding of what they experienced.

A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE tells the stories of real people surviving a catastrophic disaster and its aftermath. It shows what was lost and gained, and in the end, it is a story of hope and perseverance. It does us all good to be carried into that world and ultimately to have a better appreciation of the experiences of those around us.

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